Clipping the Input FM9

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Kelleys Heroes

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So I find my self hitting red really easy with my Les Paul. I adjusted the A/D sensity down to 10% to keep it from hitting the red too much. Is that normal?
 
JRkelley said:
So I find my self hitting red really easy with my Les Paul. I adjusted the A/D sensity down to 10% to keep it from hitting the red too much. Is that normal?
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It’s not typical, but it’s not abnormal, either. It all depends on how hot your pickups are.
 
it's not affecting gain into the grid as one might think. A common practice is to set input sensitivity to get your strongest guitar tickling red on harder strums for best input to AD conversion - then forget - other guitars may not tickle red as much but AD conversion will still be fine with no preset gain lost/added in relation to what's observed on input meters - just stay away from extreme lo (<6%) / hi (>94%) values on input sens'. There is the odd guitar that's either so hot or so weak that it
can't get into the range of adequate input sensitivity, but these cases seem rare.
 
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It also makes a big difference in how aggressively you pick. Some folks just barely tickle the strings with the pick while others beat the crap out of them. Your "typical" input level can vary quite a bit from someone else even with the exact same guitar.
 
While I haven't actually heard any clipping at reasonable levels yet, I have to set mine to what feels like an absurdly low level to get it to "tickle the red". So low that I have noticed it impacting the tone in a negative way, and making the gate very finicky to work with.
So i set it to what sounds good. I'm not tickling the red at all, I'm buried elbow deep in it. My red light tickles OFF, if I'm playing anything but very softly that red light is lit.
I still only have that control set to around 27-30, anything more and I CAN hear negative impact on the sound, so it seems very much like the scale is way off to me, and the way they tell you to do it does NOT work on ANY of my guitars. So I do what sounds good.st,small,507x507-pad,600x600,f8f8f8.jpg
 
Musikron said:
While I haven't actually heard any clipping at reasonable levels yet, I have to set mine to what feels like an absurdly low level to get it to "tickle the red". So low that I have noticed it impacting the tone in a negative way, and making the gate very finicky to work with.
So i set it to what sounds good. I'm not tickling the red at all, I'm buried elbow deep in it. My red light tickles OFF, if I'm playing anything but very softly that red light is lit.
I still only have that control set to around 27-30, anything more and I CAN hear negative impact on the sound, so it seems very much like the scale is way off to me, and the way they tell you to do it does NOT work on ANY of my guitars. So I do what sounds good.View attachment 108584
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Input sensitivity changes do not affect sound /tone in any way within normal values (6-94%)
 
sprint said:
Input sensitivity changes do not affect sound /tone in any way within normal values (6-94%)
Click to expand...
That's what the manual says yes. In practice though, to "tickle the red" I'm at 3, and above 60 I'm clipping the input. Sounds good around 27 so that's where she stays.
 
"Tickle the red" is a bit vague. Record a DI track, zoom way in on the waveform and look for clipped peaks. A nipped peak here or there is no biggie, but if your waveform looks like a freshly mowed lawn, Input Sensivity is set too high. Adjust and repeat.
 
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I've played different guitars thru my fm9, even ones with very hot active pickups, and I had no problem avoiding input clipping.
My bet is your pickups are way closer to the strings than they should be
 
mr_fender said:
"Tickle the red" is a bit vague. Record a DI track, zoom way in on the waveform and look for clipped peaks. A nipped peak here or there is no biggie, but if your waveform looks like a freshly mowed lawn, Input Sensivity is set too high. Adjust and repeat.
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I'm hooked up to my SPDIF interface on my Neumann KH120 and I could hear clipping. just going through some presets and I could hear that ugly clipping that doesn't sound like an amp.
Thought I'd take a look in cubase
Screenshot 2022-09-18 at 11.52.37.png
First wave form is just a straight input to output block. I thought it would be like the AXE FX 2 bypass, barely audible ? but it's WAY LOUD I had to use the dimmer on my interface.
The second waveform is from the dry signal (input 5 on the FM9) recorded straight into cubase I am right that thats the dry signal?
I set my input to 22%

It's a Seymour Duncan JB
 
It's clipping pretty hard in that second clip. I'd reduce the sensitivity. The first one is loud because output 1 is not unity gain. It's about 18 dB hotter.

I run my JB at about 15% on my Axe III.
 
I don't get this thing, presets are clipping internally to my ears, yet the thing isn't loud enough. I put a backing track on and it nearly blew my ears off because of how loud I turned the volume up on my interface to compensate.

sigh .....best go watch some videos to see what I missed then.

(I'm just venting, I know input level doesn't ejffectgain or volume of the preset or anything after it)
 
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HarrySound said:
I'm hooked up to my SPDIF interface on my Neumann KH120 and I could hear clipping. just going through some presets and I could hear that ugly clipping that doesn't sound like an amp.
Thought I'd take a look in cubase
View attachment 108598
First wave form is just a straight input to output block. I thought it would be like the AXE FX 2 bypass, barely audible ? but it's WAY LOUD I had to use the dimmer on my interface.
The second waveform is from the dry signal (input 5 on the FM9) recorded straight into cubase I am right that thats the dry signal?
I set my input to 22%

It's a Seymour Duncan JB
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Both samples are definitely clipped, even though the waveform in the second one looks smaller, and in the first one you're probably getting both input and output clipping.

In the first sample the signal is so strong cuz, unlike axe fx 2/ax8 where the signal was boosted in the amp block, in the axe 3/fm3/9 it's the output blocks that boost the signal (iirc around 20dB) to take it to line level, while all other blocks are designed to maintain a level close to unity.
This difference is easy to see when you bypass the amp block, in axe3/fm3/fm9 the dry signal is pretty much at the same level as the amped signal, while on axe2/ax8 it is much lower.

The way this is implemented in the new generation is definitely more convenient in various scenarios imo, except when you want to pass the unaltered dry signal to the output. But luckily we also have unity gain output(s) available to do so, and via SPDIF/AES you can just choose "input 1" as the source.
 
DLC86 said:
Both samples are definitely clipped, even though the waveform in the second one looks smaller, and in the first one you're probably getting both input and output clipping.

In the first sample the signal is so strong cuz, unlike axe fx 2/ax8 where the signal was boosted in the amp block, in the axe 3/fm3/9 it's the output blocks that boost the signal (iirc around 20dB) to take it to line level, while all other blocks are designed to maintain a level close to unity.
This difference is easy to see when you bypass the amp block, in axe3/fm3/fm9 the dry signal is pretty much at the same level as the amped signal, while on axe2/ax8 it is much lower.

The way this is implemented in the new generation is definitely more convenient in various scenarios imo, except when you want to pass the unaltered dry signal to the output. But luckily we also have unity gain output(s) available to do so, and via SPDIF/AES you can just choose "input 1" as the source.
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See it is worth posting rambling nonsense on this forum because someone like yourself will come a long and make sense of it.

So that’ll be why I was shocked to compare just a compressor block in the axe 2 with the same thing on the fm9. There was an 18db difference!

Now it’s making sense.
 
HarrySound said:
See it is worth posting rambling nonsense on this forum because someone like yourself will come a long and make sense of it.

So that’ll be why I was shocked to compare just a compressor block in the axe 2 with the same thing on the fm9. There was an 18db difference!

Now it’s making sense.
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BTW, I just checked and the boost on out1 and out2 is exactly 18dB
 
sprint said:
Input sensitivity changes do not affect sound /tone in any way within normal values (6-94%)
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That is what I remembered having been said for a long time, and what I also said, but that is not what the manual actually says:

Remember that, except at very low settings (5% or less), input level adjustments do not affect gain levels or what you hear. This is because as you adjust the level to the input of the A/D converter, the output of the converter compensates accordingly, so your guitar signal level remains exactly the same when it reaches the grid and any virtual amps or effects.
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unix-guy said:
That is what I remembered having been said for a long time, and what I also said, but that is not what the manual actually says:
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Do you mean the absence of the 95-100% impact reference in the manual? ya, I always thought maxing Input sens was bad, but maybe not, so normal range for input sensitivity is actually 6-100% not 6-94% as I mention above. The main point I was getting to was that I don't think there is ever any tonal or gain differences within the recommended normal range of input sensitivity (6-100) - sure, one may start hearing static if the input starts clipping hard but, short of that, in my experiments with this, I've never heard any tonal (sounds better / sounds worse) or in-the-grid gain differences between one value and another except for the extreme setting. Just surprise that some seem to hear this, but hey, my old tinnitis ears don't hear a lot of stuff :)
 
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